Collages

Going on long train journeys as a child, I remember picking up these magazines where there was a girl’s body in underwear. On other pages were clothes with white tabs that you had to cut out and then dress up her body. I used to love the cutting out and creating different ensemble every time.
I didn’t stop to think that these little girls, along with all the women in the glossy magazines on the shelves, were white.
From birth, from different sources which include the media, billboards and family, the beauty standard, the ideal has always been the white woman.

Creating colourful backgrounds as part of my visual journaling practice, I started to play around with cut out figures from fashion magazine. I felt that I was just perpetuating the dominant ideology and belief systems using these female figures so I started to cut off their heads and replace them with nonsense. Watches, food, rocks, mountains, handbags.

Objects. Reinforcing how these women’s bodies are just objects within these magazines, within society and that they are not the standard of beauty we, as black women, should be aspiring to. Instead we should and are becoming our own standard of beauty, our own subjects.

Series 1 – Miss Bouquet Walks Out On A Mission